The Ultimate Manifesto, Part 1: “Judicial Restraint”

     We heard rather a lot from John Roberts, during his confirmation hearings, about the importance of judicial restraint. It’s one of the shibboleth phrases of the Right, to which obeisance is paid but seldom is more than lip service given. Just this past week, Jeb Bush, now a candidate for the Republican presidential nod, echoed the phrase when he was asked about how he would select federal judges were he elected.

     So what do these worthies think it means? Not the dictionary meaning, mind you, but the meaning its most conspicuous users put to it by their actions.

     One interpretation of the phrase is found in the judicial doctrine of stare decisis. That’s rough Latin for let the decision stand. Its black-robed users mean by it We defer to earlier decisions of this body, feeling it would be wrong to overturn them. Wrong why? Sometimes there is no reason other than stare decisis itself: the unwillingness to overrule an earlier decision, sometimes because subsequent law and government action might have been founded on it, sometimes out of an unarticulated fear that it might somehow reduce the authority of the Supreme Court.

     Viewed thus, judicial restraint protects tyranny quite as well as anything else.

     The role of the Supreme Court as stated in the Constitution seems relatively simple and straightforward:

     The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;—to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;—to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;—to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;—to Controversies between two or more States;—between a State and Citizens of another State; —between Citizens of different States, —between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

     In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. [Article III, Sections 1 and 2]

     The most important of all the authorities – note that I do not use the word “powers” here – the Supreme Court has undertaken, “judicial review” of the law for Constitutional fidelity, is conspicuously absent from that list. It was arrogated to the Court by Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison, and has never been seriously challenged.

     Let’s stipulate for the purposes of this tirade that “judicial review” is an authority somehow implied to the Supreme Court by the Constitutional phraseology. Inasmuch as judges routinely claim the authority to proclaim the law – anyone who’s ever sat on a jury has heard a judge say to that jury that “I am judge of the law; you are judges of the facts” – it’s as well established de facto as any other authority ever claimed by a court. Is it even conceivable that “judicial review” includes the authority to rule against the text of a law on the basis of the Court’s notions about what its drafters and those who voted on it intended?

     The most extreme extension of the notion of “deference to legislative authority” could not possibly embrace this assertion of judicial telepathy. Yet that was the foundation for John Roberts’s execrable majority opinion in King v. Burwell, his most recent rescue of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare:

     It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner. See National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U. S. ___, ___ (2012) (SCALIA, KENNEDY, THOMAS, and ALITO, JJ., dissenting) (slip op., at 60) (“Without the federal subsidies . . . the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all.”). Congress made the guaranteed issue and community rating requirements applicable in every State in the Nation. But those requirements only work when combined with the coverage requirement and the tax credits. So it stands to reason that Congress meant for those provisions to apply in every State as well. [From the majority decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts ]

     This, then, must be taken as consistent with John Roberts’s conception of “judicial restraint.” In his masterpiece The Vision of the Anointed, the great Thomas Sowell wrote:

     Those who argue for this view of the judge’s role – for “judicial restraint” – often say that judges should follow the “original intent” of laws in general and the Constitution in particular. Yet ironically, this very phrase has been seized upon by opponents and given meanings far removed from that of those who use it. Professor Ronald Dworkin, for example, argues against original intent on grounds that “mental events” in the minds of legislators or writers of the Constitution are difficult or impossible to discern. But of course, nobody voted on what was in the back of somebody else’s mind. What was enacted into law were the meanings of those words to others – in short, the public meaning of words. As Justice Holmes put it, the relevant question was “not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English, using them in the circumstances in which they were used.” Those who have urged judicial restraint have been very explicit that they did not mean to delve into the psyches of lawmakers, but to begin with the public meanings of the words the lawmakers used, as of the time they used them....

     Far more is involved here than a mere misunderstanding. Power is at the heart of the dispute. Although New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote of the Constitution’s “expansive phrases that would be given contemporary meaning by each generation,” generations do not vote on the constitutionality of laws. Judges do,. Thus the current generation’s decisions are not replacing those of a previous generation; judges’ decisions are replacing those of the current generation by imposing their own revision of what a past generation has said. The replacement of historical meanings by “contemporary meanings” is a major transfer of power to judges, not only from other branches of government, but from the people. It is an erosion of self-government and an imposition of the social vision of judges in its place.

     When I wrote just yesterday that law and the rule of law no longer exist, this is exactly what I meant. Today, black can mean white if five “Justices” of the Supreme Court decree it to be so...and no one can do a damned thing about it.

     There is no longer law; there is only the will and whim of those in power...and they have made it their top priority to own the courts, from the lowest to the highest. What, then, of the citizen’s supposed duty to obey the law? Upon what is it founded?

     More anon.

The Fatal Decisions

     Is it even imaginable that the “Justices” who just voted to:

1. Ignore the written text of a bill and all the collateral evidence that says “and we really mean it this way;”
2. Seize political control of the oldest and least political of all human institutions;

     ...don’t know what they’ve done?

     The Supreme Court has just written into our “Constitutional” framework that:

• The text of a law doesn’t matter;
• The text of the Constitution doesn’t matter;
• What a majority of “Justices” imagine about what those who passed the law intended are of decisive legal weight;
• There is no human practice, custom, tradition, or institution which the State cannot seize and tax, regulate, reorganize, or completely redefine to suit itself.

     The entire edifice of constitutionalism has just been ceremoniously trashed. Oh, we could see it coming from miles away. At least, I could; I’ve been watching this progression too closely and for too long to harbor any illusions about it. However, I must admit that I didn’t expect it to happen quite so rapidly or precipitously. Alvin Toffler would have something to say about that, wouldn’t he?

     We will pay for this in blood. I can only hope that the first persons to render up their due will be those selfsame “Justices.”

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     Allow me to tote up what we have lost, these few years past.

     There is no longer a Supreme Law in these United States. Indeed, there is no longer law as Americans have traditionally understood it. Therefore, there is no rule of law. How could there be, when judges have arrogated the privilege of rewriting the actual text of a law to reach a decision in harmony with their preferences?

     Without law in the customary sense, there cannot be a legislature with definite powers and responsibilities. At this point, Congress is either omnipotent or powerless, depending on the correlation of forces inside the Washington Beltway.

     There is no longer a president as the Constitution defines the office: one who presides, enforcing objectively defined laws arrived at by a legitimate, well specified procedure, rather than ruling by decree. Instead we have an Orator-In-Chief with dictatorial powers. How did we choose the current bearer of the title? According to his skin color? Great God in heaven, what will the next one be like? At least the Romans had one Marcus Aurelius. When will ours arrive?

     There is no longer any branch of government that we can accurately call “the people’s representatives.” The House of Representatives, utterly controlled by the GOP, supposedly the party of limited government and strict Constitutional construction, has done nothing to head off any of the overreaches of the Obama Administration or the federal bureaucracy it commands. Should it fail to impeach John Roberts for his treason, the Senate will have revealed itself as a high-priced club of no consequence.

     There is no longer a default assumption of probity for judges. Actually, that fantasy died some time ago. A judge who can rewrite a law, or nullify a solemnly agreed contract simply by calling it “unfair” or “unconscionable,” is not to be trusted...and that is now within the powers of any man who dons the black robe and mounts a judicial bench.

     No, I’m not telling you anything you couldn’t have figured out for yourself. Maybe you had already figured it out, in which case all the above is just my concurrence. Allow an old man at least one cri de coeur before he throws up his hands in surrender.

     R.I.P.U.S.A. We hardly knew ye.

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     I’ve gone from dreading a Second American Revolution to hoping for one. If I were young and hale, I’d surely march with it. I might even try to touch it off myself.

     My friend Dystopic has reminded us that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Have you ever wondered what Karl von Clausewitz had in mind when he wrote that? I articulated it as explicitly as I could in the Foreword to this novel:

     Other prominent science fiction writers have delved into the possibilities of a society that’s resolved that there shall be no State. However, none of the ones with which I’m familiar address the sociodynamics of such a society: the forces that would shape its development, with special emphasis on those that would tend to tear it from its founding premise. For me, that’s the really fascinating thing about anarchism. You see, it’s been tried, with varying degrees of longevity and success, many times in the history of Man. Yet there are no anarchic societies left on Earth as I write this foreword.

     Well, except for one: the whole of the human race.

     The States of Earth exist in an anarchic relation to one another. Each has its own regional code of law, which might differ markedly from all the others. Despite several thrusts at the matter over the centuries, there is no “super-State” to enforce a uniform code of law over them all. More, they view one another as competitors in many different areas; their populations and institutions are often in sharp economic competition with one another. Thus, they are often at odds. They resolve important disputes among them through negotiation or warfare.

     When a society has no agreed-upon written law that 98% or more of the participants willingly respect, there is nothing but rule by naked force, according to the will and whim of the dominant power. Global society has been relatively peaceful and stable these past few decades – I said relatively, Gentle Reader; brush up on your history if you think otherwise – because the dominant power has been that of the United States, which had no imperial ambitions and was fairly reliable about doing what its political masters said it would do. Over the course of the last six years we’ve seen what happens internationally when those conditions dissolve. I put it to you that we’re about to see what happens domestically, as well.

     The whole point of a political system is to arrive at the law: to produce it, maintain it, and enforce it. But law has just been revealed to be nonexistent, a phantasm. Therefore politics, the mechanism by which we attempt to avert rule by naked force according to the will and whim of the dominant power, has just been revealed as pointless. Add that in a nation whose citizens possess an estimated 300 million firearms, the “dominant power” isn’t as dominant as its masters would like to believe. If we weren’t talking about the United States – if the country of interest were some blood-soaked realm in the Balkans, for example – what would you expect to happen?

     Ask yourself, in all honesty, whether the conditions and premises that have averted that sort of development from our country are still in force.

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     If there’s anything more to say about law, politics, and government under these circumstances, I can’t conceive of it this fine June morning. Perhaps that will pass; perhaps I’ll see things in a rosier light in a day or so. Being optimistic by nature, I’ll hope for that and turn to other things for the nonce. Perhaps I’ll derive some motivation for my novel-in-progress from all this crap. That, at least, would be pleasant.

     Have a nice day.

Concurrence At Last

     Now and then, I find myself hammering a point that other people simply don’t get. The symptoms range from mute incomprehension to outrage (at me). The modal response is somewhere around “What do you mean? That can’t be right.”

     So it’s been with the point I’ve strained to make about the evil of “compelling government interest:”

Probably the most common approach to the teaching of "political science" in our institutions of "higher learning" -- really now, you should know those are sneer quotes without having to ask -- is the authoritarian-allocation model. In this conception, the quest for political power is a contest over who shall be awarded the sovereign's privilege of licensure: the power to say who may do any given thing, who may use any particular resource, and who shall be exempt from all such laws. Underneath this model lies the assumption that there is no higher moral standard that would preclude the sovereign's arbitrary allocation of privileges. In other words, the sovereign is above all conceptions of absolute right and wrong....

Most members of our political class accept the authoritarian-allocation model as fully applicable to the United States. They dismiss Constitutional constraints as "obsolete;" many of them will admit it with the cameras rolling. Neither does the clash with our concept of individuals' rights bother them overmuch; they have a number of dodges with which to evade it, most prominent among them the notion of "compelling government interest." However they rationalize it, they see the proper sphere of government as the licensure of all things: decreeing who may do what, and with whom, and for how much, and under what circumstances, for any and every human activity under the Sun.

     Licensure and “compelling government interest” are interdependent; each requires the other to sustain it. In any analysis of the consequences of accepting those notions as valid, the emphasis should lie upon the government’s privilege of forbidding under threat of punishment. The power to say “you may” arises wholly from the power to say “you may not” – and to enforce the dictate at gunpoint.

     But why no government can validly claim to have “interests,” compelling or otherwise, seems to elude most people. The core of it is that in the American Constitutional system, a government is an agent: a hireling charged with specified responsibilities and allowed to engage in certain delimited activities in discharging them. The relationship is exactly parallel to a homeowner who engages a landscaper to trim his hedge. The job is defined by the homeowner, and the landscaper is to do that and nothing else.

     Imagine that the landscaper sees himself as having “interests” that include turning the homeowner’s hedge into a topiary. Would the homeowner be justified in becoming upset? Would he have a good case for refusing the landscaper his fee for that “service?” If the answers strike you as obvious, ask yourself why claims of “compelling government interests” should be treated any differently.

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     It was with great joy that I stumbled this very morning upon this essay by Will Grigg:

The nation-wide convulsion of collectivist rage triggered by enactment of the Indiana religious freedom act illustrated that “civil rights,” as currently defined, requires the immediate punishment of any business owner who exercises the right to refrain from commerce. Yes, self-styled proponents of “tolerance” can succumb to the temptations of punitive populism, just like their counterparts on the Right.

     An even more compelling illustration of the totalitarian mindset that typifies what is now called “civil rights” was offered by Idaho’s HB 2, more commonly known as the “Add the Words” bill. If it had been enacted by the state legislature, HB 2 would have added “sexual orientation” of various kinds to the state’s Human Rights Act as a protected category with regard to discrimination in employment and “public accommodations.” It also would have explicitly criminalized – perhaps for the first time anywhere in the Soyuz – the act of reserving one’s right to refuse service.

     Section 67-5909 (5) (b) of the legislation would have made it a “prohibited act” for “a person” to “print, circulate, post, or mail or otherwise cause to be published a statement, advertisement, or sign which indicates that the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages of a place of public accommodation will be refused, withheld from, or denied an individual or that an individual’s patronage of or presence at a place of public accommodation is objectionable, unwelcome, unacceptable, or undesirable.”

     If HB 2 or a future measure employing the same language were to be enacted, a business owner who posted the “right to refuse” sign could not only be sued, but dragged away from his property in handcuffs. A critic of the measure could likewise find himself being prosecuted for publishing a letter to the editor, a Facebook post, or a blog comment urging business owners to exercise the right of refusal.

     Punishing the peaceful expression of such opinions would be justified, according to the civil rights commissariat, because government has a “compelling interest” in preventing discrimination – even at the expense of individual liberty....

As an abstract fiction without body, parts, or passions, the state cannot have a legitimate “interest” in anything. Indulging, for a moment, the contrary view, the state’s interest in self-preservation would always dictate the expansion of power, and the corresponding curtailment of liberty. This shouldn’t be considered surprising once it’s understood that the “compelling state interest” doctrine had its origins in the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision Korematsu v. United States – which upheld the mass internment, in military custody, of Japanese-Americans who had broken no law.     

     Please read it all.

     The “compelling government interest” doctrine, under which any individual right can be abridged, modified, suspended, or simply ignored, can be used to justify any action by government, regardless of its consequences. Who, after all, gets to define such interests? It certainly isn’t you or I.

     The notion is entirely antithetical to constitutionalism, under which a government’s sphere of action is constrained to specified subjects and further limited by individuals’ rights. Had the Founding Fathers foreseen “compelling government interest” being put forward to rationalize the outrages we suffer today, they’d have given up on the whole Constitutional project as being too good for a people who’d kneel before such a lie.

     But we’ve accepted it. And it has swallowed us whole.

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     I’ve written that the Republic, as defined by our Constitution and the legal tradition we inherited from our English origins, has fallen. If there’s a single, most culpable actor in this tragedy, it would be our judiciary, which invented the “compelling government interest” notion to justify the mass internment of West Coast Japanese-Americans during World War II.

     Will Grigg understands. To have encountered another commentator who grasps this critical point has lifted my spirits. More, he appreciates the infinite scope of that evil doctrine, which is now being used to suppress individual rights in every venue from “anti-terrorism” to “civil rights.” It’s the root of a great many evils. It must be ripped out of our soil for us to have a chance at freedom once again.

     I’ve also written of the right to discriminate. That right is indistinguishable from our more commonly understood rights. It comes into best focus when applied to freedom of association. If we forfeit that freedom when we engage in commerce, then we never had it in the first place. Neither do we have the right to engage in commerce as we choose; that devolves to a case of licensure, in which the privilege of doing business is bestowed or withheld by a government, according to conditions set by a legislature or a court. If that implies a right to keep you from earning the living that sustains your life or the lives of your loved ones, so be it. The Omnipotent State’s interests always come first, don’t y’know.

     Think about it.

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     No doubt some leftist will seize on the above sentiments and immediately accuse me of bigotry: “You hate blacks and gays! You want to discriminate against them!” Time was, I’d have immediately said, “No, I don’t.” The years have taught me the folly of that approach. Today I reply, “So what if I do?” The apoplexy this often causes my accuser is entertaining enough to sell tickets.

     Americans’ rights are gone. We’ve given ground before the encroachments of government and the relentlessness of the Left’s propaganda, such that merely an accusing word is enough to start us backing away from the defense of our rights. The underlying malady is the desire for others’ approval: the need to be seen as “nice guys” even by those who hate us passionately and always will.

     It’s time to revive the prickly persona that has no truck with others’ interference in our preferences and choices. Along with that must go a certain truculence, even if the Left’s bien pensants should vilify us for it. Why should we care what they think of us? Aren’t our rights infinitely more important?

     It might be late in the year for it, but here’s a new resolution for 2015 even so: This year, be a prickly son-of-a-bitch, and proud of it.

     Will Grigg sees the necessity. Do you?

This must be shared here as well

https://youtu.be/v1t9xBe0wPw

Descent Into Chaos Part 2: The Federal Level

If you’ve been paying attention, you’re already aware of some unpleasant sequelae to the “wave” elections of November 2014:

• The reinstallation of John Boehner as Speaker of the House;
• The announcement that there will be no serious attempt by the Republican-majority Congress to thwart Obama’s anti-immigration-law-enforcement ukase or ObamaCare;
• Obama’s pre-emptive announcement of his intention to veto any legislation he dislikes that emerges from that Congress, regardless of its substance or its popularity.

At this time, even the support of Congressional Democrats for such items as the Keystone XL pipeline and the repeal of the most destructive portions of the Affordable Care Act appears to be insufficient to get those things to happen. That could change, of course, but it would take a significant shift in the attitudes and loyalties of Congressional Democrats: away from the protection of Obama and toward the performance of their duties, to say nothing of the American populace. Moreover, there would remain a chance that Obama would direct the executive agencies responsible for implementing and enforcing the laws to ignore Congressional emissions he dislikes, including ones passed by veto-proof majorities. That would require Obama’s impeachment and trial, which, given their previous support for him and his policy preferences, would test Congressional Democrats far more severely than the impeachment and trial of Bill Clinton.

The most pleasant thing one could say about Washington at this time is that at least we don’t have federal politicos exchanging gunfire inside the Capitol Building.

Yet.

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The federal system is designed to check the powers of each of the branches of government against the willingness of the other two to approve and cooperate. From that perspective, parts of it are working according to the design...but a significant part of it – i.e., the executive’s responsibility to “take care that the laws shall be faithfully executed” – is not. Worse, that default of duty hasn’t enraged Congress sufficiently to call Obama to account for it. Considering that the Reconstruction Era Congress tried (and nearly convicted) Andrew Johnson for an offense that, by comparison, was a mere peccadillo, it should leave us with no great opinion of “our representatives” on Capitol Hill.

It becomes ever clearer that American Constitutional order is badly endangered: by the would-be dictator in the White House, by the low quality of the Representatives and Senators whose duty it is to rein him in, and by the thorough politicization of the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

One of the less-discussed things about “the rules of the game” is that the rules are the game. For Black to move his knight as if it were a bishop, smile into White’s face and say, “I have to, or I’ll lose,” is equivalent to overturning the board and scattering the pieces. This is just as true of Constitutional government as it is of chess.

I’ve written before that the enforcement agency for the Constitution’s constraints on government power and activity is the people in arms. Indeed, there could hardly be any other:

Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both. – Frederick Douglass

We dislike to think of the remedy of blows. It would entail violence; bloodshed; a time of even greater disorder than we endure today, regardless of the outcome. So we keep hoping that the system will right itself, if helped along by an election or two. And we continue to ratify that broken system, by implication, with our votes.

Is it not yet clear that we’ve been had? Played for fools? Soothed into believing that all can be made right by voting for the candidate with the right totem animal? Only to be told afterward that “there’s only so much we can do without the Senate / the White House / a veto-proof majority / an end to the war / and end to violence in the Middle East / a command from God” -- ?

But absent a popular uprising, the federal descent into chaos – a “system” large sectors of which ignore the rules under which they’re supposed to operate -- will continue, for a simple reason: The persons most responsible for it are getting what they want, and getting away with it.

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Charles Krauthammer noted on yesterday’s edition of Special Report that there’s no reason to think that, for the final two years of his legitimate tenure in the Oval Office, Obama will do anything but exactly what he pleases. He need never face the voters again. He’s shown a complete indifference to popular opinion, to the Constitutional constraints on his authority, and to the ultimate consequences for his co-partisans in Congress. Nor has he ever been anything but what his upbringing and his education made him: a self-absorbed, power-obsessed social-fascist and a despiser of better, more accomplished men than he.

No ostrich tactic can blind us to the facts about Obama today. We have too much of his history to steer by. But what of Congress? Is there even a remote possibility that Obama could outrage it sufficiently to rouse it to its duties?

That’s unclear. Imagine the worst case: Obama decrees the indefinite suspension of all elections to federal offices, orders the dissolution of Congress and the Supreme Court, and declares that henceforth his word shall be the law of these United States. He mobilizes the Army, including the National Guard, and directs it to implement those decrees regardless of any and all resistance. What would follow?

Would the Army do as Obama directs?
Should a portion of the Army refuse such orders, would the remainder fire upon it?
More to the point, would Congress fulfill its Constitutional duties to remove him after such outrageous decrees?
Ultimately to the point, given his usurpations of power up to now and the flaccidity of Congress before him, would you give odds against Obama seriously considering such a move?

Stay tuned.

Unpleasant Necessities Dept.

It saddens me to need to take up cudgels against a stance taken by a dear friend. Yet intellectual honesty and loyalty to my own convictions has made it necessary.

Before going any further, please read this piece at Adrienne’s Corner. Settle yourself and your own opinions about the incident described and the reactions to it you’ve just read.

I hold no brief for Alex Jones – in fact, I’ve never read his site or his writings – so I’m coming at this without any personal allegiances to defend. My quarrel is over:

1. Local police departments possessing and deploying military-grade hardware that private citizens are forbidden to have;
2. A law enforcement officer disparaging “well armed” “constitutionalists” to an arbitrary audience;
3. Treating the rule of law, a critically important and almost wholly misunderstood principle of ethical and constitutional theory, as if it requires each of us to submit to any and every “law” some legislature hurls at us without resistance.

In my opinion, all three of the above matters are despicable. If what I’ve read here has been accurately reported, then this sheriff has displayed an unacceptable degree of contempt for one of the most important developments of our time: the formation of militias of private citizens in the hope of curbing the rampant overreaching and lawlessness that characterizes contemporary American governments.

The MRAP vehicle itself is of little concern, but we may legitimately ask: What other weapons of war, forbidden by “law” to the general public, are in the hands of the Spokane police department? Is it not clear that the whole point of the Second Amendment is to insure that citizens must always be able to arm themselves well enough to resist tyranny – that the people shall always be capable of putting down an abusive government? Yet there are a myriad “laws” that forbid the general public to own the very weapons of war being distributed to local police!

As to this deputy sheriff who refers offhandedly to “well armed” “constitutionalists” as a threat to him and his, that’s what they’re supposed to be: A force that can punish tyranny, that can react to abuses by the organs of the State with sufficient power to redress officially perpetrated injustice! If they were no threat, what other influence would exist to curb the excesses of agents of the State? What point would there be to citizen ownership of weaponry? Deer hunting? Alongside that, a man whose overriding concern is his personal safety does not deserve to wear a badge of office – especially not that of a lawman.

Finally, that paramount, widely misunderstood conception of American governance: the rule of law: That principle does not mean that we must all submit meekly to whatever “laws” are imposed upon us. Consider the Fugitive Slave Act for one example; consider New York’s “SAFE” Act for another. It means that agents of the State are compelled to obey the laws to the same extent as the citizenry – that a “law” that creates a legal distinction between private citizens and government agents is therefore invalid. That’s constitutional theory in a nutshell – the very reason we have a Constitution in the first place!

The critical question is and has always been:

Does an agent of the State have the privilege of breaking one law to enforce another, without penalty?

Because if he does:

• The slaughter of Randy Weaver’s family was perfectly acceptable;
• The slaughter of the Branch Davidians in Waco was perfectly acceptable;
• The murder of John Singer to enforce a law against home schooling was perfectly acceptable;
• Indeed, any deed by any agent of the State, at any time and place and under the color of any “law” whatsoever, is perfectly acceptable; the agent cannot be penalized for it.

Now, as to some of the other observations made in support of this sheriff and his deputies:

• Yes, it is unwise to confuse local law enforcement with the federal government: You are in more danger from a government near to you than from one far away.
• Concerning “psychotic nutjob Alex Jones:” As I said, I hold no brief for the man and have no acquaintance with his writings. But remember always that the strengths and weaknesses of the speaker cannot be transferred uncritically to the subjects and arguments he addresses. (Alternately, “even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”) It is essential to divorce arguments and observations from the personalities of those who make them.
• Having joined (or not) the military, a police force, or any other agency of the State has no bearing on one’s rights as a citizen, nor on the freedoms to which he is entitled. Inversely: Does honorable military service or voluntarism confer extra rights on an individual? Would you excuse a man of a serious crime, for example armed robbery, on the grounds that he had a sterling record in the military and was a volunteer to the local fire department?
• The term “right-wing fringe lunatics” is merely a slander of unnamed persons whose stances could well be exactly the one stated here. It is not a refutation of that stance.
• That other lands suffer even worse governments, and even worse abuses, is irrelevant to abuses of power here in the United States. Foreign tyranny cannot excuse the excesses and lawlessness of our own. If it were so, we would be required to reform the entire world before acting on events in our own domain.

Food for thought.